What the Clinic Is For

In one line

A clinic is trying to do three things at once, and they are separable: to give the student professional skill, to give a poor client real help, and to change the student's idea of what a lawyer is for.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the objectives of clinical legal education are professional, social and ethical; professionally it develops the lawyering skills of interviewing, counselling, fact investigation, drafting, negotiation and advocacy, which classroom teaching cannot deliver; socially it delivers legal services to persons who could not otherwise obtain them, in furtherance of Article 39A of the Constitution; and ethically it exposes the student to professional responsibility and to the conditions of the poor, forming an attitude towards the profession that no examination can produce.

Objective one: professional skill

What it covers. Client interviewing and counselling, fact investigation, legal research applied to a live problem, drafting, negotiation, and advocacy where the student is permitted to be present.

Why the classroom cannot deliver it. Chapter 280 gives the argument: skill is produced by supervised performance and feedback, and no amount of exposition substitutes.

How the Rules recognise it. Schedule II's papers 21 to 24 are the professional objective written into the curriculum: fifteen drafting and fifteen conveyancing exercises, simulation for alternative dispute resolution, moots, trial observation and an internship diary.

And the distinctive skill the clinic teaches that even simulation cannot. Facts arrive from a real person in the wrong order, incomplete, mixed with what the person thinks matters, and sometimes untrue. Extracting a usable account from that is the single most transferable thing a clinic gives.

Objective two: social service

The constitutional anchor. Article 39A directs the State to secure that the operation of the legal system promotes justice on a basis of equal opportunity and to provide free legal aid so that opportunities for securing justice are not denied by reason of economic or other disabilities. Chapter 540 teaches it in full.

The arithmetic. Legal services are scarce and expensive; law students are numerous and unpaid. A supervised student can do work that would otherwise not be done at all, particularly the large amount of legal help that is advice, form-filling and pointing a person to the right authority.

The statutory recognition. Regulation 24 of the NALSA (Legal Services Clinics) Regulations 2011 recognises clinics attached to law colleges and law universities, and regulation 23 permits law students to adopt a village and organise legal aid camps. Chapter 600.

And the judicial recognition, in Manubhai Pragaji Vashi, chapter 40: the Article 39A duty requires an adequate number of properly equipped law colleges, because without legal education for a good number of students the public will be deprived of legal assistance.